How to Use Sumo Like a Pro and Boost Your Traffic

When you join a conversation on any forum or site for online marketers, most of the topics are about getting traffic. If no one visits your posts or pages, you will not achieve your online business goals.

However, they don’t want any type of traffic; they want free and targeted traffic. If the right people visit your website, good things will happen.

While most people anticipate the importance of getting the right visitors, many business owners fail to optimize their websites correctly and they do not attract the maximum amount of traffic. Well, now is the right moment to introduce Sumo.

Sumo (formerly SumoMe) is a combination of tools that can help you to grow your traffic. These tools are created for the average WordPress user and especially for people who do not know coding or have any technical knowledge.

How You Can Get Free Targeted Traffic Using Sumo

This article is not about promising site owners “thousands of visitors instantly” like many online scams do. It is about growing your traffic naturally by expanding your online presence with the right tools.

The main free traffic sources of the most successful websites are the following:

• Search engines
• Social media
• Email marketing

Of course, the above are not the only ways to find visitors to your site. However, if you master any of them, you can really improve the amount of traffic that visits your website. Furthermore, you can combine them to get even better results. But how can you achieve that?

Most people who use the Internet on a daily basis, follow and visit their favorite websites frequently. The bad news is that those visitors will not start browsing your site just because they want to become a subscriber.

But what if guests could see a subscription form every time they visited your site? Some of them would eventually subscribe. For this reason, Sumo can help you. It has all the needed tools to enable them to follow you on social media and make them subscribe to your email list.

How You Can Use Sumo

If this is the first time you’re trying Sumo, then it’s possible that over the few next days, you will notice that many other, often big, websites and blogs are using Sumo’s form tools. Although the basic forms were first created to collect emails, nowadays, they can help you in a lot of different ways.

For example, instead of collecting emails, you can ask your visitors to like your Facebook page. Another common strategy is to add a call to action. It depends on the goals of your website.

There are five types of call to action:

1. Collecting Emails
2. Collecting push notification subscribers
3. Adding a call to action (to a custom link)
4. Getting social shares
5. Collecting info with custom code (when you want more information than just the email and the name)

When you decide what the primary goal of your site is, you can go to the next level and choose the form type that will work best for you.

7 Form Types to Achieve Your Goals

Let’s start by saying that if you use the form types correctly, all of them can work effectively. These form types can be chosen when you create a new list builder form from your Sumo account dashboard. You need to test them, compare the results, and then decide what works best for you.

1. Cart Casino

Cart Casino is not your ordinary email collection form. It is the highest-converting form among other types because of its unique way of collecting emails. When visitors entered their email addresses, they can spin to win random prizes.

It is best suited for eCommerce and SaaS companies and Large Scale Businesses.

2. Popup

Use this form if you want to make sure that you get your visitors’ email addresses before they leave the site. Using the Smart Mode feature, the popup will appear in the middle of the page when the user moves the cursor in the address bar. You can also set your desired timing using the Manual Mode.

3. Scroll Box

This type of form shows a popup that sticks to the bottom of the page. Choose this if you don’t want to be pushy about getting your visitors’ email addresses. You can define when and where the popup will appear–bottom right, bottom left, top right or top left.

You can also analyze the designs that have more conversion using the A/B testing tool.

4. Inline Form

Inline form is a popup that is embedded with the content of your page. You have to copy the embed code and paste it where you want the form to appear or you can edit the settings so Sumo will automatically embed the form for you.

5. Click Trigger Popup

Visitors will see this popup when they click on a link you have added to your content. It should be a call to action for subscribing to your list. It is also a less spammy way to get subscribers.

6. Welcome Mat

This is the most popular form type of Sumo. It is the most aggressive way to grab your visitors’ emails because it covers the entire page. However, some of your readers will not appreciate “Welcome Mat” since it can be bothersome and interrupt what they are doing.

7. Smart Bar

A short form that sticks to the top of your page. It is a distinctive way to grow your list. The next two steps are the customization of the selected form and the connection with your autoresponder. Then, you are ready to make your form go live.

Sumo keeps statistics that you can see on your account, so you can easily figure out whether they work or not.

3 Tools to Increase Your Shares on Social Media

Social media is a great way to get free targeted traffic. When random people share your content, you should be happy. They feel that your content is interesting and it is possible to get some extra visits from their friends.

The only thing you can do here to increase the numbers of shares is to make it easy for them.

1. Share

You can add social media buttons to your content. When someone wants to share your content with their followers, they can easily do that with a few clicks.

2. Image Sharer

It does the exact same thing as “Share” (read above) for the images on your site.

3. Highlighter

When guests highlight a part of the content, it shows a popup with the highlighted content and the option to share it on Facebook or Tweet it.

You can activate these three tools at once, but it would be better to keep a balance. Many social media buttons on a page may actually have a negative result. Therefore, you should start by adding some buttons like “Share”. Later, you can test out the other available options to see how they work and which ones give you the best results.

3 Ways to Analyze the Behavior of Your Visitors

The last category is about the tools that can analyze the behavior of your website. When you activate them, you can get an exact idea of what guests read and click on, how long they stay on the website, and what call to action works.

1. Google Analytics

Your Sumo account will connect to your Google Analytics account. Sumo has created this tool to make it easier for you to analyze the stats of your site. Furthermore, it is easier when you have all the needed tools in one place.

2. Heat Maps

It reveals the actions of the visitors on a website. When they click frequently on a specific link, you’ll see “heat”. The color of the heat depends on the action. If you see a cold color (blue, green), this spot of your site has less action.

3. Content Analytics

It is helpful when you have articles on your site. You can see how much of the content your visitors read and where they stop. Then, you can use this information to improve your content or move your call to action to the right place.

Last Thoughts

Building a list of subscribers and a strong presence on social media can increase your traffic quickly. Sumo provides all the tools you need to achieve these goals. You only need to use them properly.

You could start with “Share” and an inline form. These will not bother or irritate your visitors as they do not interrupt whatever they are reading. Then, you can test out the rest of the tools, one by one, and check their performance with stats.

If you do not already collect emails, and you do not have the option for your readers to share your content yet; you will start seeing an improvement over the next few weeks thanks to Sumo.

Although it has various pricing plans, geared toward all the types of online businesses, you can start using it for free until you reach the 500 subscribers mark.